{"id":13185,"date":"2012-08-14T23:30:25","date_gmt":"2012-08-15T03:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/?p=13185"},"modified":"2016-12-26T17:55:45","modified_gmt":"2016-12-26T22:55:45","slug":"invasion-of-the-oxymorons-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/2012\/08\/14\/invasion-of-the-oxymorons-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Self-Plagiarism: Oxymoron Invasion (1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A.<\/a>The internet presently finds itself awash in sleuthing about and commentary on a widely touted “plague” of a practice oxymoronically labeled “self-plagiarism.” The hapless poster boy for this presumably unethical practice,\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em> pop-science maven Jonah Lehrer, got caught reusing some of his own material<\/a>. His punishment? Mao-era Cultural Revolution-style public self-criticism, during which he confessed to being “lazy” and “stupid,” followed by\u00a0his forced resignation<\/a> from his new staff position at the magazine.<\/p>\n

\"Jonah<\/a>

Jonah Lehrer, Imagine (2012), cover.<\/p><\/div>\n

Now, to be precise, Lehrer lost his slot at The New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0for\u00a0his fabrication of quotes from Bob Dylan<\/a> (published not in\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em> but in Lehrer’s best-selling spring 2012 book, Imagine: How Creativity Works<\/em>). Unquestionably unethical and unprofessional to put invented words in anyone’s mouth. He also appears to have appropriated passages of text from Malcolm Gladwell and others without using quotation marks or crediting them in the book. There’s no acceptable defense for those misdeeds, for which Lehrer richly deserved to get spanked hard.<\/p>\n

But no one’s disputing that. The longer-term uproar involves Lehrer’s practice of reusing some or all of a previously published piece of his own writing without specifically indicating its original appearance. As\u00a0Josh Levin reports in his June 19, 2012 commentary\u00a0for Slate, “Why Did Jonah Lehrer Plagiarize Himself?<\/a>” The\u00a0New Yorker<\/em> felt obligated to annotate Lehrer’s half-dozen blog posts shortly before the Dylan-quotes crisis. Levin writes that the magazine “<\/em>has now appended editors’ notes to all five posts on\u00a0Lehrer’s new blog Frontal Cortex<\/a>\u00a0and to an additional\u00a0post he wrote about Steve Jobs in 2011<\/a>. Those notes acknowledge that ‘paragraphs,’ ‘portions,’ or ‘details’ originally appeared in writing that Lehrer had done elsewhere.”<\/p>\n

I consider Levin’s answer to the question posed in his essay’s title, “Why Did Jonah Lehrer Plagiarize Himself?”\u00a0as it appears in the subhead \u2014 “Because he stopped being a writer and became an idea man” \u2014\u00a0foolish and unprofessional.\u00a0Over the past century and a half countless authors, ranging from scholars to critics to journalists to creative writers, have repurposed extracts from and even complete texts\u00a0of their own that they’ve previously published. I find the assertion that they thereby “stopped being writers” risibly\u00a0jejune. For example:<\/p>\n

\"Edmund<\/a>

Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle (1931), first edition.<\/p><\/div>\n